Wireless Communications

What will 5G be? What it will not be is an incremental advance on 4G. The previous four generations of cellular technology have each been a major paradigm shift that has broken backward compatibility. Indeed, 5G will need to be a paradigm shift that includes very high carrier frequencies with massive bandwidths, extreme base station and device densities, and unprecedented numbers of antennas. However, unlike the previous four generations, it will also be highly integrative: tying any new 5G air interface and spectrum together with LTE and WiFi to provide universal high-rate coverage and a seamless user experience. To support this, the core network will also have to reach unprecedented levels of flexibility and intelligence, spectrum regulation will need to be rethought and improved, and energy and cost efficiencies will become even more critical considerations. This paper discusses all of these topics, identifying key challenges for future research and preliminary 5G standardization activities, while providing a comprehensive overview of the current literature, and in particular of the papers appearing in this special issue.

What Will 5G Be

Cellular networks are usually modeled by placing the base stations on a grid, with mobile users either randomly scattered or placed deterministically. These models have been used extensively but suffer from being both highly idealized and not very tractable, so complex system-level simulations are used to evaluate coverage/outage probability and rate. More tractable models have long been desirable. We develop new general models for the multi-cell signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) using stochastic geometry. Under very general assumptions, the resulting expressions for the downlink SINR CCDF (equivalent to the coverage probability) involve quickly computable integrals, and in some practical special cases can be simplified to common integrals (e.g., the Q-function) or even to simple closed-form expressions. We also derive the mean rate, and then the coverage gain (and mean rate loss) from static frequency reuse. We compare our coverage predictions to the grid model and an actual base station deployment, and observe that the proposed model is pessimistic (a lower bound on coverage) whereas the grid model is optimistic, and that both are about equally accurate. In addition to being more tractable, the proposed model may better capture the increasingly opportunistic and dense placement of base stations in future networks.

A Tractable Approach to Coverage and Rate in Cellular Networks

In cellular wireless communication systems, transmitted power is regulated to provide each user an acceptable connection by limiting the interference caused by other users. Several models have been considered including: (1) fixed base station assignment where the assignment of users to base stations is fixed, (2) minimum power assignment where a user is iteratively assigned to the base station at which its signal to interference ratio is highest, and (3) diversity reception where a user's signal is combined from several or perhaps all base stations. For the above models, the uplink power control problem can be reduced to finding a vector p of users' transmitter powers satisfying p/spl ges/I(p) where the jth constraint p/sub j//spl ges/I/sub j/(p) describes the interference that user j must overcome to achieve an acceptable connection. This work unifies results found for these systems by identifying common properties of the interference constraints. It is also shown that systems in which transmitter powers are subject to maximum power limitations share these common properties. These properties permit a general proof of the synchronous and totally asynchronous convergence of the iteration p(t+1)=I(p(t)) to a unique fixed point at which total transmitted power is minimized. >

A framework for uplink power control in cellular radio systems

We propose a variable-rate and variable-power MQAM modulation scheme for high-speed data transmission over fading channels. We first review results for the Shannon capacity of fading channels with channel side information, where capacity is achieved using adaptive transmission techniques. We then derive the spectral efficiency of our proposed modulation. We show that there is a constant power gap between the spectral efficiency of our proposed technique and the channel capacity, and this gap is a simple function of the required bit-error rate (BER). In addition, using just five or six different signal constellations, we achieve within 1-2 dB of the maximum efficiency using unrestricted constellation sets. We compute the rate at which the transmitter needs to update its power and rate as a function of the channel Doppler frequency for these constellation sets. We also obtain the exact efficiency loss for smaller constellation sets, which may be required if the transmitter adaptation rate is constrained by hardware limitations. Our modulation scheme exhibits a 5-10-dB power gain relative to variable-power fixed-rate transmission, and up to 20 dB of gain relative to nonadaptive transmission. We also determine the effect of channel estimation error and delay on the BER performance of our adaptive scheme. We conclude with a discussion of coding techniques and the relationship between our proposed modulation and Shannon capacity.

Variable-rate variable-power MQAM for fading channels

It is shown that, particularly for terrestrial cellular telephony, the interference-suppression feature of CDMA (code division multiple access) can result in a many-fold increase in capacity over analog and even over competing digital techniques. A single-cell system, such as a hubbed satellite network, is addressed, and the basic expression for capacity is developed. The corresponding expressions for a multiple-cell system are derived. and the distribution on the number of users supportable per cell is determined. It is concluded that properly augmented and power-controlled multiple-cell CDMA promises a quantum increase in current cellular capacity. >

On the capacity of a cellular CDMA system

A method and apparatus for controlling transmission power in a mobile communication system is disclosed. The method disclosed provides for a closed-loop power control method. A mobile station (30) provides information on the quality of the signal received from the base station (50), and the base station (50) responds by adjusting the power allocated to that user in a shared base station signal. The transmission power is adjusted initially by a large increment and then ramped down at an increasingly decreasing rate. The mobile station (30) also provides information to the base station (50) as to its relative velocity and the base station (50) adjusts its transmission power in accordance with this velocity information.

Method and apparatus for performing power control in a mobile communication system

Summary form only given, as follows. Interference among simultaneous users presents the primary limitation on capacity of all multiple access communication systems. In frequency-division-multiple-access (FDMA) and time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) cellular systems, interference is controlled by assigning disjoint frequency or time slots to all users in the same cell and disjoint frequency bands to adjacent cells, but to increase capacity, frequency bands are reused for sufficiently separated cells. These techniques lead to a hard limit on capacity and a tradeoff between frequency reuse and the C/I levels which can be tolerated. With direct sequence spread spectrum CDMA, frequency reuse is universal, with the same band utilized by all users over all cells with all user signals appearing as noise to all other users' receivers, progressively more attenuated with the distances involved. Careful analyses of both forward and reverse link interference lead to capacity estimates considerably higher than those for FDMA and TDMA systems, as well as a soft capacity limit unattainable with the more conventional systems. >

Charles E. Iii Del Mar Wheatley

Papers

On the capacity of a cellular CDMA system

On the capacity of a cellular CDMA system

Method and apparatus for performing power control in a mobile communication system

Universal frequency reuse: the CDMA advantage in capacity for digital cellular radio